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This study measured the relationship between student's religion, gender, and propensity for fantasy thinking with the change in belief for paranormal and pseudoscientific subjects following a science and critical thinking course that directly confronted these subjects. Student pre-course endorsement of religious, paranormal, and pseudoscientific beliefs ranged from 21 to 53%, with religion having the highest endorsement rate. Pre-course belief in paranormal and pseudoscientific subjects was correlated with high scores in some fantasy thinking scales and showed a gender and a religion effect with females having an 11.1% higher belief across all paranormal and pseudoscience subcategories. Students' religion, and frequency of religious service attendance, was also important with agnostic or atheist students having lower beliefs in paranormal and pseudoscience subjects compared to religious students. Students with either low religious service attendance or very high attendance had lower paranormal and pseudoscientific beliefs. Following the critical thinking course, overall beliefs in paranormal and pseudoscientific subcategories lowered 6.8-28.9%, except for superstition, which did not significantly change. Change in belief had both a gender and religion effect with greater reductions among religious students and females.

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
— Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883)

Other sorts of evidence help. People are too subject to lying, hallucinating, and making errors. If one person says he has a flying dog, I remain skeptical. Ten reports of a lake monster might be a small-scale conspiracy to get tourists to come to an impoverished hamlet. If there is film of the flying dog with a hundred eyewitnesses, and an actual egg laid by the lake monster, then we have something different. You have to doubt to get anywhere.

There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
— Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883)

WaxRubiks, get a copy of Demon Haunted World by Sagan, also there is book coming out tomorrow called the skeptics guide to universe, I think they might have a podcast it only take a few hours to listen to all of them.